A bilingual journalist and a digital producer for the CBS-affiliated television station KENS 5.
I’m not totally sure if A Vigilante — the feature debut from writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson — is meant to be soaked up as entertainment so much as a reconciliation between movies-as-art and movies-as-therapy. The small-scale story is interested in a single dominating issue, that of domestic violence, though in ways that feels inconsistently intentioned, despite…
A progressive rage simmers at the despondent heart of Little Woods. It isn’t just that writer-director Nia DaCosta spends a busy 95 or so minutes examining how working-class economic anxiety often begets the toppling chain of dominoes in those trapped in it, but more so that she tells her story through the lens of a…
The title of Penny Lane’s film, Hail, Satan?, is presented as a question. But from the viewpoint of this documentary on the contemporary non-theistic, activist movement that is the Satanic Temple, and the everyday people who run it, it’s pretty clear-cut — perhaps to the point of ironic confirmation, more likely to the point of…
The director’s chair being filled by established actors is becoming an increasingly popular card for Hollywood to pull these days, albeit with wildly varied results. Up until this point, the receptions of those films in a way mirror the novice auteurs behind the camera; Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born” — perhaps you’ve heard of…
Much like the immediate outlook of its unlucky characters, the details are stark in Arctic. In Joe Penna’s pulls-no-punches survivalist drama, the seemingly skyscraper-sized “SOS” carved out in deep snow; the remains of a grounded, battered plane that looks like it’s flown through hell and back; and the pop of red of a winter coat…
Arena lights are off, locker rooms are empty and primetime TV slots are dotted with holes. We don’t have to be told that explicitly in Steven Soderbergh’s (“Unsane”) confidently insightful new film High Flying Bird. Curiously empty New York City sidewalks and forlorn attitudes tell us what we need to know: Professional basketball games are…
The documentary genre has experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2018 and capitalizing on that, Netflix is swooping in at the start of the year with another original deep-dive of their own, this one concentrated on the events leading up to, making up and resulting from 2017’s Fyre Festival fiasco. And like the organizers…
